The Most Difficult Thing Read online

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Deadly.’

  ‘When?’

  A half-smile appeared on his face.

  ‘The day before I met you guys, believe it or not. That’s why I was … You know, shit-faced, on my own … That’s not my usual style, I’ll have you know. I had come in for a meeting with the editor, trying to get my job back, but what can I say, the man’s a prick. Still, he ran my story the same day though, didn’t he? Not too moral to miss out on a final scoop …’

  He shrugged again, taking another bite of pizza.

  ‘What happened?’

  He paused then, as if he had changed his mind. For an alarming moment I thought he was going to stand, but he simply lifted an arm to his cheek for a moment before carrying on.

  ‘That story, the one about the undercover charity investigation? One of the protestors I embedded myself with is claiming we were in a relationship.’

  There was an authority to his delivery that dampened the shock.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Well, it might have been, except it turns out she was fifteen at the time.’

  His words hung in the air.

  ‘The time of what?’

  ‘There’s a photo, she says it shows us “being intimate”. I mean, Jesus, it’s nothing. I’ve seen it, we’re just talking. But she says it was more than that. Her parents, they threatened the paper, said if I wasn’t disciplined, they’d take the case to court. It would be my word against theirs, but apparently that doesn’t mean anything. With things the way they are in the industry, there isn’t the kind of cash needed to defend a law case. And, like I said, the editor’s an arse. He had been looking for an excuse to get rid of me …’

  Harry’s face lifted suddenly, turning, his eyes narrowing. ‘Shit, I don’t know why I told you that. I’m sorry. It’s intense, I know. I just … Something about you, I just felt I could … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put that on you, we hardly know each other.’

  His face was parallel with mine, something passing between us.

  ‘It’s bullshit, you should know that. I mean, Jesus …’

  I nodded, my hand instinctively moving towards his, ‘I do.’

  As he opened his mouth to speak again, a key jangled loudly against the front door. Lurching back, his legs swung forward off the sofa as Meg’s face appeared.

  There was a moment of doubt and then she spoke, her features recomposing themselves.

  ‘Hi!’ Her eyes briefly flicked between the two of us, and then she smiled. She did not ask aloud what Harry was doing there. At the time I didn’t either.

  Harry had suggested it, all of us meeting up again the following week. We had been saying an awkward goodbye that evening in the flat, he, Meg and me. By then, my hangover had been usurped by an urgent fizzing in my gut.

  ‘I’ll be working near here in the afternoon if you fancy a drink afterwards?’ Harry had looked at me and then, out of politeness, at Meg.

  ‘Bring your friend David too if he’s around …’

  If he spotted my disappointment at the mass invite, he didn’t show it.

  David was already there when I arrived at the pub, as planned, the following Friday. It was the first time I had seen him since the incident at the club and he was holding his hands under the table when I arrived. Standing up, he presented me with a large, purple, gold-embossed bag, the plush cardboard soft and soothing as it swept against my fingers.

  ‘I just wanted to apologise for what happened. I—’

  ‘David, what …’

  His face fixed on mine as I tugged at the ribbon that had been pulled tight in a perfect bow, protecting whatever was inside, unable to keep the smile from lifting the corners of my mouth.

  The material was a light grey wool, which hung just above my knees, with a soft shearling lining. From the label, it must have cost more than the rest of my wardrobe combined.

  ‘It’s – well, it’s perfect, but …’ He must have seen the flicker of uncertainty in my face as he stood, casually, wary of applying too much pressure.

  ‘It’s no big deal. If it’s not right the receipt’s in the bag. I just thought … Meg’s taking forever, shall we order? I’m starving.’

  It was then that I looked up and noticed Harry and Meg, already seated at the bar on the other side of the pub, Meg facing away from us. At that moment, Harry looked up and our eyes met, his gaze followed a second later by Meg. I could have sworn it was disappointment I saw in her eyes, but then her face lifted into a smile and she jumped off the stool, striding towards us, her eyebrows rising as if to say, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  CHAPTER 7

  Anna

  The air was heavy and damp that winter, the perfect backdrop to the months of boozy nights that followed in pubs across London, the four of us drinking until the small hours before falling away to our respective beds. But then, as time passed, the initial thrill of our weekly group gatherings was worn away by erratic working hours and office parties, until one night it was just Harry and me sitting across from each other at a table in the corner of the Crown and Goose, where an irate chef passed out plates of food through a minuscule hatch.

  We shared one bottle of wine, and then another, our fingers resting side by side on the round wooden table, oblivious to the comings and goings of the other drinkers as they passed back and forth on their way to the bathroom, the urgent ring of the kitchen bell clattering above our heads.

  By the time we rose to leave, I was surprised to find the bar swollen with people. Stepping out into the street, the twinkling fairy lights entwined along the shop fronts, Harry stopped and pushed me gently back against the wall of the pub. Holding me there for a moment, my neck in his hand, he paused before kissing me, his lips soft but persuasive.

  And that was it, our fate sealed. I had waited for that confirmation of what I had felt for months, and when it came it was as if it had never not been there.

  Meg had gone back to Newcastle for a couple of weeks, so the flat was ours alone, that first night together. I woke the following morning to a feeling of utter contentment, until I turned to find an empty space in the bed next to me. Running my fingers over the grooves where his body had been, I briefly wondered if I had imagined it all.

  My sense of unease grew when I called his phone later that morning, and the next day, only to reach his voicemail, the recorded message playing a jeering loop against my ear. When he re-emerged, a few days later, he was apologetic but reassuring. There was a job he was doing, which had pulled him away unexpectedly. He was sorry he couldn’t be in touch.

  ‘You know what it’s like.’

  It took everything I had to play down my disappointment, but I knew better than to let the extent of my feelings show. So instead I nodded along – even agreeing when he insisted that we could not tell anyone about us, swearing myself to secrecy.

  The case against him was ongoing, he offered by way of explanation. If the defence found out he was dating a former intern – and that was how they would frame it, he said – then they would have a field day.

  I was a consenting adult, it was ridiculous. But maybe something about the situation suited me too. It was not as if I was leading David on, exactly, but he had done so much for me already and the idea of him knowing I was with someone else … It would not have been fair.

  What bothered me most, though, was how unjustly Harry had been vilified, how quick his colleagues had been to turn against him.

  ‘But you didn’t do anything,’ I raged one night as he reminded me once more of the charges he could be up against. My counter-arguments were always weak, and he looked at me like I was a child he cared for but who knew nothing of the world.

  ‘Oh, Anna, of course I didn’t sleep with her – but do you really think that means anything?’

  He shook his head despairingly.

  ‘The girl who made this claim against me, or rather the girl whose parents made this claim … They don’t care that she had told me s
he was twenty-one. They don’t care that she was the one who duped me.’

  To be honest, I could have contested him on that point if I had wanted to. He was the investigative reporter; it was he who had infiltrated the organisation, using whatever means he could to extract the information he wanted. Even if that meant earning the trust of a young woman who believed he was after her, rather than what she could do for him.

  Yet how could I say any of that without sounding unsupportive? Harry did not need another person rallying against him. More importantly, I understood why he did it. What he did, it was about the story, the pursuit of truth and justice, regardless of the cost. That was simply the person he was.

  The threads in my stomach pulled tighter as I stepped off the bus that morning in Bethnal Green, on my way to his flat for the very first time. My breath in the January air was a curling finger of smoke drawing me forward, as I followed the directions he had sent, past the coffee shop with the couples in beanies sipping hot drinks on a terrace makeshifted out of old wooden crates; young men with bloodshot eyes sucking on roll-up cigarettes, already weary of the winter that still had some way to go.

  Hidden on the other side of a scruffy communal garden was a square of grand red-brick houses, stained black where they met the pavement by centuries of tar and a drift of pigeon feathers. Adjoining it, an elegant Victorian mansion block curved and disappeared towards the next street. Harry’s flat was on the second floor, that much I knew, and with that tiny detail I had already drawn a picture in my head, instinctively filling in the gaps.

  So many times our evenings together had been curtailed by a sudden phone call that would see him downing his pint and standing to pull on his coat, leaning in to kiss me, reluctantly, his lips hovering over my mouth, telling me he wished he could stay. In those moments, I would picture him coming back to this flat, to the bedroom I imagined filled floor-to-ceiling with books, photos of his childhood stacked precariously on a mantel, shirts thrown over the back of an easy chair. But never did I question where he went in the intervening hours. Maybe I told myself it did not matter, or maybe I was scared what the answer would be.

  On the doorstep, I took a moment to gather myself, a row of numbered buzzers in a panel on my left, drawing a deep breath before pressing the bell. There was a moment of silence then a crackle and Harry’s voice.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  He paused and then his breath lightened. ‘Hello you.’

  The sound of his feet drumming against the stairs echoed my heartbeat. When he opened the door, his face broke into a smile. Neither of us spoke as I stepped inside the hallway, which was even colder than the street.

  He laced his fingers in mine and led me past piles of post and folded buggies and bikes, our feet quietly moving up the stairs.

  It was another hour before we let each other go long enough for me to take in his flat.

  The hallway, where our clothes now lay discarded, was tall and white, uncluttered by pictures or coat-hooks. At the far end of the hall, there was a kitchen, with a little round table and four chairs. Just enough cutlery and cups, a single frying pan and a sieve. Everything with its own place and purpose.

  The only thing that was out of place was a single box of condoms, which he had gone to lengths to dig out; his ability to think so cautiously, even in the heat of the moment, pricked at me once it was over. At that moment, entangled in his arms, I would have risked anything never to let him go; it was the first clue, if only I had been willing to see it, as to how uneven the balance of power between us was.

  ‘Must be a reaction against my house, growing up,’ Harry said, watching my eyes react to the sparseness of it all, the precision. It was the first time he had mentioned his childhood and I stayed silent, willing him to carry on.

  We were moving through to the living room now, my eyes scanning the original fireplace, unused; just a few books neatly stacked over purpose-built shelves. Hungrily, I drank in any detail I could latch my eyes upon.

  Comparing the scene before me with the image of the flat I had created in my mind, I found my imagined version already slipping away.

  ‘When you’re one of six and there are other people’s things everywhere, I suppose a kind of efficiency grows out of craving your own personal space,’ Harry said.

  I thought of the silence of my parents’ house, the endless space.

  ‘You grew up in Ireland, right?’

  ‘Galway.’ He turned to the door, the look passing over his face telling me he’d had enough of this kind of talk, and I was happy to follow him back to safer ground. Any question I asked him was liable, after all, to be turned back on me.

  ‘And this is my bedroom.’

  Harry had moved across the hall and was standing in the doorway of the final room. There was a small double bed against one wall, a desk against the other, piled high with papers.

  His eyes followed mine, over the bed, which was low to the ground, the sheets white and nondescript. Beside it, on stripped wooden floorboards, there was a square alarm clock and a notebook. Nothing else to betray the details of a life.

  Moving towards the desk, my eyes trailed the papers neatly covering the surface.

  ‘So, what is it you’re working on?’

  He moved to intercept me, pulling me towards him as I reached the desk.

  ‘If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.’

  There was something so powerful about him, so far beyond my reach. And yet the truth was we weren’t so different, he and I. For all his bravado, for all his success. People like David, their lives were defined by what they had; Harry’s life, like mine, was defined by what he had lost.

  ‘It was a Saturday morning,’ Harry confided one night, our noses pressed together in the darkness of his flat, the occasional flash of a car headlight through the bedroom window the only sign that in this moment we weren’t the only two people left on Earth.

  ‘I’d been moaning on and on about a toy car I wanted. Little red thing I’d seen in the window in town a couple of days earlier. Wouldn’t quit. In the end, my pa says, “If it’ll shut you up, I’ll get you the damn car.” He walked out the house, and that was it. Ten minutes later, he lost control of the steering wheel and … Three people died.’

  There was a pause and I felt the pain that moved across his face.

  ‘Oh, Harry.’ I moved so close to him that I could feel the muscles in his body contract with grief.

  ‘It was my fault.’ His voice was so quiet, but I felt the tears soaking into my scalp. ‘You can’t imagine what that’s like. To know—’

  ‘That was not your fault, Harry, don’t you ever think that.’ I clung him, hushing his cries with my own, as if soothing my younger self.

  I squeezed him harder then, feeling my own confession pour from my lips; the relief of saying the words out loud tinged with fear. Our secrets reaching out for one another, their grip so tight I could hardly breathe.

  CHAPTER 8

  Anna

  If it had happened a few months earlier, I would have told Meg about Harry and me, regardless of what I had promised. How different things might have turned out if I had. There was nothing she and I did not share, back then, nothing we wouldn’t have told each other, until suddenly there was.

  At first I put the cracks that began to show in Meg’s armour down to the pressures of office life – the spikiness that had always been offset by a natural generosity and easy humour falling away into something that would have been otherwise unexplainable.

  David had picked up on it too, on the occasions when we still found time to hang out together, the three of us, between the various pulls of our respective working lives. He had tried to raise it with me but I had played the ignorant, telling myself I would not discuss Meg behind her back but knowing deep down that I just did not want to think about it.

  And then, one day, the blinkers were torn off.

  I was sitting at the table in the kitchen of our flat, typing u
p a piece on monochrome accenting. Behind me, a single panel of wall was lined incongruously with illustrations of botanical branches: a single roll of statement wallpaper which I had plucked from a box of samples at the office, with Clarissa’s encouragement; one of a number of disjointed acquisitions with which I had started to embellish the flat over the past months. I was squinting at the computer, trying to block out the churn of Camden High Street filtering in through the sash, when Meg walked through the front door, slamming her keys onto the counter, pulling open the door to the fridge and closing it again.

  ‘Where have you been? Are you OK?’

  It had been two or three days since I had last seen her, only an unfinished cup of coffee on the counter when I woke that morning offering any sign that she had been home at all.

  She looked odd, changed somehow, in a way that I could no longer ignore: her fingers scratching at her thighs, front teeth chewing her bottom lip. There was a darkness that had taken hold, its shadow stretching beneath her; an anger, barely contained, slowly tightening its grip.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You just seem a bit … I tried to call.’

  ‘I’m fine, I’m tired. Work’s full on …’ Her eyes skittered around the room as if in search of an answer.

  ‘David rang, a minute ago, wanted to know if we were going to his party.’

  Even as I said it, I knew I was setting myself up for a fall. Harry was away on a job, and although house parties were not my scene, especially not without Meg there to create a distraction, something had made me say yes.

  ‘Can’t, there’s something I’ve got to do.’ Meg’s voice was distant.

  ‘What is it?’

  It stung that I even had to ask.

  ‘Just something for work.’

  She walked out of the kitchen, and even though her bedroom stood directly on the other side of the wall, she could have been on the other side of the world.

  When she came back out, half an hour later, her expression had softened slightly.